A step in the right direction, but the future of Europe needs bigger thinking

For a government which claims that it wants to place Britain's relations with its European partners on a more stable footing, there has been a remarkable turnover of ministers charged with those responsibilities.

Yesterday Denis MacShane became Tony Blair's sixth Minister for Europe in a little more than five years. He succeeds Doug Henderson, Joyce Quin, Geoff Hoon, Keith Vaz and Peter Hain. Confusion may now be added to instability, for the Government could be said to have four or five ministers for Europe. Mr Hain, in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales, retains his place on the European constitutional convention. Then there is Jack Straw, who as Foreign Secretary formally holds cabinet responsibility for European matters, and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who has arrogated the power to decide if we join the euro. Not forgetting, of course, Mr Blair, sometimes his own minister for Europe.

Where that leaves Mr MacShane remains to be seen, but at least the new Minister for Europe arrives with an impeccably Europhiliac reputation. He is a skilled political operator and a good communicator; but he will have his work cut out negotiating the prickly egos that surround his new patch.

The most pressing external challenge for Mr MacShane, and, indeed, all friends of the European project, is to push the Constitutional Convention chaired by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing towards "blue skies" thinking about the future of the EU. The Laeken Declaration that established the convention stated that "the European institutions must be brought closer to citizens".

The draft report of the convention, published yesterday, cannot give much ground for hope that this will happen. It does offer some suggestions about how to keep the increasingly rickety institutions of the EU running. The six-month rotating presidency is clearly unworkable and should be replaced, as the convention suggests, with a permanent arrangement. A charter of fundamental rights and dual European citizenship are also worthwhile ideas. Rebranding the European Union as "United Europe", however, doesn't work very well in English, while the proposal to rename it "the United States of Europe" is just plain incendiary.

But there is a sense that the convention is European business as usual. There is too much horse-trading between nations and between institutions, too little effort to build a European demos and too little big thinking. Where is the sort of spirit that famously inspired the conference held in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a durable and elegant constitution for the USA? Or the inspiration of the founding fathers of the EU who met at Messina in 1956 and pledged an "ever closer union of the peoples of Europe"? The deliberations of the convention may well be overtaken by the crisis in the Growth and Stability Pact, which governs the standard of living of every European and which forms the EU's "economic constitution".

A Europe of 25 in 2004, all agree, cannot be governed by the technocratic institutions that suited the Six of 1957. A radically new settlement is needed. Freed of vested national and institutional interests, such a constitution would write itself: a loose, truly federal European Union concentrating purely on the issues that demand its attention – economic policy, immigration, the environment – and devolving everything else to national, regional or local level. That is the model that the EU must eventually adopt. M Giscard's convention is, at best, only a small step towards that ideal.